Sunday, January 17, 2016

Quick links

What caught my attention recently:

"Big ideas emerge from spills, crashes, failed experiments and blind stabs .... As people dredge the unknown, they are engaging in a highly creative act .... the habits that transform a mistake into a breakthrough" ([1])

Lots of details on recommendations, personalization, and experimentation at Netflix in a new ACM paper ([1])

Fun and interesting Slate article on how Facebook selects posts for the news feed ([1])

New paper claims the filter bubble for news is much stronger in what people self-select and on social media than in search and recommendations ([1])

"Bayesian program learning (BPL) framework, capable of learning a large class of visual concepts from just a single example and generalizing in ways that are mostly indistinguishable from people" ([1][2][3])

NIPS 2015 paper on problems that accumulate in machine learning systems, such as dependencies between features, dependencies between models that build off each other, and complicated and fragile data preprocessing ([1])

"Should they teach [self-driving] cars how to commit infractions from time to time to stay out of trouble?"﻿ ([1])

Wal-mart is doing poorly against Amazon, which is surprising, I think ([1])

Good article on product management. I particularly like the points that most products fail (so you should expect to experiment, adapt, and iterate) and that a good product is about experiences not features ([1])

"People keep mentioning how different things are to the period just before the AI winter"﻿ ([1])

"Smartwatches still have a long way to go in terms of proving their usefulness, necessity, and style" ([1])

"CYA security: given the choice between overreacting to a threat and wasting everyone's time, and underreacting and potentially losing your job, it's easy to overreact." ([1])